Foy Nissen’s Bombay

Notes: Foy Nissen was the British Council representative in Mumbai in the 1970s. In undated notes for a lecture at Brasenose College, Oxford, Hodgkin recalled: “Foy Nissen’s Bombay is a small painting on wood which I began in 1975 and brought with me to Oxford when I became artist-in-residence at Brasenose… I thought about the view down the length of Foy’s living room in Bombay overlooking a balcony consciously covered with beautiful plants in an apartment block called Olympus. Foy himself is no longer in the picture as the gradual substitution of pictorial devices took place and the picture became something instead. It was the first picture I finished In Oxford and because of this became rather a totem and (for a long time) it was the only picture complete enough to talk about to other people”.